There are available many types of powerful SEO tools in today’s marketing world. Most of the SEO tools can be highly beneficial for all, but some are often come with a cost associated with it.
However, there is an available tool that smart marketers can leverage to assist us with the variety of tasks, we needed on a daily basis.
The One tool that smart marketers can leverage for SEO with free of cost is Google Search Console. This free tool is provided by Google and is a great way to gain insights, performance about your site in one & only one main platform.
Google Search Console is often under utilized by search marketing teams/developers. They help you to get the most benefit from Google Search Console, and we outlined the one of the four main areas within the tool to help you reach your search marketing objectives.
Before we get to know more about the four main areas within Google Search Console, let’s discuss what the tool even is. And How To Use It To Improve SEO Of Your Website.
All the questions related to GSC(Google Search Console) are covered here to let you know everything about GSC. So that you know every function & where to use it to improve SEO.
What Is Google Search Console?
Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) is a free web-based SEO tool for all webmasters who has their own website to track both the indexing and crawling stats from Googlebot web-crawler while it also provides metrics to help optimize a website for organic visibility.
This SEO tool is often useful to monitor the metrics and discover new insights, performance on daily basis to help increase your organic footprint via tracking all the enhancement your website have.
Google says, that anyone with a website should use Google Search Console to track everything on one platform. One great thing about Google Search Console is that it is easy to use for whoever has access to the property. Which makes it a universal webmaster tool. Do you support it!
Well, this is not the end there are much more features available in GSC. But, for that you need to see the whole article to understand it better than others.
So, the next is about How You Can Use & How To Setup Your Own Webmaster Tool With Google Search Console.
Google Search Console Setup & Verification
The first step that all webmasters should do is to Setup Their Own Website On Google Search Console And Then Start Verification Process. To do this, you'll need to Create A Google Search Console Property of each version supporting different types of websites including:
- http://example.com
- https://example.com
- http://www.example.com
- https://www.example.com , OR
- Any Other Subdomains
You will get the complete overview automatically by setting up all the versions of your own domain. Besides setting up properties for each version, you can also setup properties for an individual subfolder on your site (As per your need). By setting up a new property for a subfolder, you will be able to see metrics for a specific section of your site which you wants, which can be very beneficial for large sites & bloggers.
After creating your own New Property, you will need to verify the site via different verification methods. Generally there are multiple ways to verify your property within Google Search Console, including:
- HTML file upload – Upload an HTML file to your website
- HTML Tag – Add a meta tag to your site’s home page for easy verification
- Domain name provider – Sign in to your domain name provider
- Google Analytics – Use your Google Analytics account
- Google Tag Manager – Use your Google Tag Manager account
We recommend to choose your own verification method that would be the easiest and most efficient for your website verification. The most common verification method that we recommend are either via Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager. Otherwise, we typically recommend adding the HMTL Tag to the site’s header (Most easiest method).
Search Appearance
One of the first & most important section of Google Search Console is the “Search Appearance” section. This section is very important for all webmasters to understand their website status and how it may potentially show up on various Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Within the search appearance section, this shows information regarding structured markup, rich cards, HTML improvements (metadata information), and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) setup.
Each area of Search Appearance section is important to track, but the HTML improvements area provides insights that is helpful when optimizing a website.
These insights tells about duplicate meta descriptions and title tags. It also shows indexing report when some content is non-indexable, which can make a significant difference when prioritizing your optimization efforts. This is all in Search Appearance that is most important about your website tracking but technically the Google Search Console "Search Appearance" Section Is Vast Topic.
Search Traffic
The next important section in Google Search Console is the “Search Traffic” section. This section provides Insights regarding the Keywords your site is ranking for, linking metrics from external and internal links, any manual actions, international targeting metrics, and the mobile usability of your website.
Each area specified within the section Search Traffic is important, but the majority of your time will most likely found to be in analyzing the Search Analytics tab.
The Search Analytics tab shows the keywords that your site is ranking & showing up for. You can break down the tab into multiple subsections between clicks, impressions, CTR, and position. If that isn’t enough for you, then you can dive more deeper into the metrics by individual pages, keywords, countries, devices (desktop, mobile, tablet), search type (web, images, videos), search appearance (AMP or rich snippets), and the date range (which shows data within 90 days).
The search analytics tab is a very powerful SEO tool. By using this, You can analyze your site for keyword opportunities on a page or a section of your site. You can also drill down into how your mobile keywords are performing compared to your desktop keywords. At Top Rank Marketing, we use this tab to identify SEO strategies to help increase organic visibility by re-optimizing content that has multiple keywords ranking on the bottom of page, one or the top of page two. We also use the tab to guide the creation of our content plans for different SEO campaigns.
The second tab on which you should spend more time on is the mobile usability tab. Since all knows everyone are comfortable with their Mobile Devices, therefore it makes it important. This tab outlines if your website is mobile friendly or not.
It is important to stay on top of any mobile usability issues so that your site renders correctly for all types of devices, especially with Google moving to the mobile-first index. Therefore, you should care about your website if it is not mobile friendly.
Indexing
The third section in the Google Search Console is the “Google Index” section because without indexing your site will be no online visible.
Google Indexing is useful to understand How Many Pages Are Included In Google’s Index and if there are any Blocked Resources on your site. The indexing status tab is useful when you analyze your website. If Google is indexing all the pages that you want to be included in the SERPs. Than, It is good to check the pattern of the Indexing status of your website so as to see if the number of pages is growing consistently or not dropping off quickly or randomly.
The blocked resources tab is a great way to easily identify if certain pages are blocked or having some issues that we're getting from Googlebot. Than, Make sure you check this tab to optimize the crawling of the pages/resources that you want being crawled by Googlebot.
You can also remove some URLs temporarily from the Google index with the Remove URLs tab. This tab is useful when you need to remove a page quickly (if it hurts your SEO).
Note! The Remove tab only removes the page temporarily (around 90 days) and you still will need to update your site to permanently remove the page that you requested.
Crawling
The last main section that at is left from Google Search Console is the “Crawl” section. This section provides smart marketering information regarding broken pages or files on the website, crawl stats from Googlebot, and URL parameter information. The section also provides us a tool to submit your content to Google, And allows us to test your robots.txt file and Submit your sitemap to Google.
The Crawl Error tab is one of the most important section within Google Search Console. This tab shows the URLs that might be Broken or having some issues from both internal and external sources. We often recommend you implementing 301 redirects for the crawl errors that actually were pages at some point. It is important to audit the list to make sure you are not implementing any redirects that are not needed.
Another useful tab is the Sitemaps area, because you can submit your sitemap to Google to make it easier for your site to be crawled and indexed by Google. Similarly, you can also submit individual pages to Google with the fetch as Google URL Inspection tool. The fetch as Google tool is a great way to get your updated content indexed quickly & fastly of your website.
Google Search Console Most Important Features [You Should Know]
You can completely start accessing GSC for your site. By Learning the most important features of GSC to get more your website SEO improved. It’ll look something like the image below.
The primary sections includes Performance, Coverage, Experience and Enhancements. You’ll have to get familiar with these sections/reports if you want your GSC’s to completely work with data and features for your website. So, we'll learn all these Sections in a specified manner so as to get you completely familiar with these reports.
Performance Report
Performance Report — The Performance tab (located on the left-hand navigation panel) shows you strategically data that can be used to inform your Online strategy. Since performance reports, and GSC as a whole, are such a flexible tool, to know How They Use It — we’ll be highlighting their experiences throughout this whole guide:
All accounts will have their own data from Google search results in the Performance tab, but such website that have attracted meaningful traffic in Discover and Google News will also see reports specifically for those channels as well. Since traditional search performance is the most common scenario, we’ll be focusing on this aspect of the performance report. The information which available here includes (but isn’t limited to):
- The Top Queries that has been used to discover your content.
- Impressions (how often your searchers see your site in Google’s search results).
- Clicks (how often they click on your website in Google’s search results).
- Average CTR (the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click).
- The Average Position of your site in google search results.
You can manipulate the reportas your own choice to show you the information that you’re most interested in, via the filter bar (circled in yellow), metrics options (indicated by the red arrows) and dimensions tabs (indicated by the hashed blue box).
- The Filter Tab enables you to filter the information by search type (web, image, video or news), date range (up to the last 16 months), query, page, country, device and search appearance (the search result type or feature).
- You can also check or uncheck total clicks, total impressions, average CTR and average position to toggle the chart (indicated in green) to show the desired data over a given timeframe.
- The Table (indicated in orange) provides you with an overview of Clicks & Impressions based on the dimension that you’ve selected (such like queries, pages, countries, devices, search appearance and dates).
It’s an excellent idea to get comfortable using the filter bar. Experiment by clicking on the “+ New” button to reveal a Menu Bar that enables you to filter your data by query, page, country, device and search appearance.
You can also use these filters to compare two values means you can compare two values like Counties etc. Try a new filter and edit or remove filters when you want to analyze something differently.
The updated interface can be used to determine the value of keywords and whole sections of your site, traffic source by country, the type of devices searchers are using, and how Google is serving your pages in SERPs.
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Index Coverage Report
Index Coverage Report — This report shows the status of your website’s URLs within Google’s index and is used to troubleshoot technical SEO issues that can prevent your pages from showing up in search result page.
Google will email you when it detects a new index coverage issue/report on your site, but it won’t email you if an existing issue becomes worst. It’s a good idea to check this report from time to time to ensure that any issues are under your control to avoid any issue for your website.
Similar to the Performance report, toggling the “Error,” “valid with warnings,” “valid” and “Excluded” options which will refresh the chart to show you the desired data. Here’s what each of those options means.
- Error: The page is not indexed and which is currently not appearing in Google search results. Clicking on a particular type of error (in the table below the chart) will show you the URLs that was affected by following issue, which can get you on the path to resolving them.
- Valid with warnings: These are the pages which are indexed and may or may not be appearing in Google search results. GSC uses this designation because it thinks there’s a some problem that you should be aware of or should fix it.
- Valid: This indicates that a page is indexed and completely showing up in Google search results — there’s no need for further action (unless you don’t want the page to be indexed).
- Excluded: These pages are not indexed and are not labeled as having an error because Google thinks it is your intention to have these pages excluded or you have excluded these pages. This can happen when a page has a Noindex directive or there’s available an alternate page with a canonical tag. for example,
Suppose, If you’re steadily creating a new content, your number of indexed pages should be trending upward. If you may see them trending downward then you’re merging or getting rid of content that no longer serves as a purpose. If there’s a sudden dip in indexed pages (that isn’t warranted by something you did, like merging content), that may indicate that there’s an issue preventing Google from indexing your content.
Google’s Index Coverage Report helps pages that contains a full list of errors that you can use to resolve issues which are stopping Google from indexing your web URLs.
Page Experience Report
Page Experience Report — Google added this page experience report to GSC ahead of its page experience update. The report combines the Core Web Vitals report with the other metrics that are part of the page experience update. Core web vitals data comes from the Chrome User Experience (CrUX) report, which gathers anonymized performance metrics from real visitors to your site to track all its page ecperience.
At a glance, the Page Experience report also shows you…
- The percentage of “Good URLs” — the proportion of all Mobile URLs that have a “good” Core Web Vitals status and no mobile usability issues, according to the Mobile Usability report.
- The Total Impressions you’re getting from good URLs.
- The number of “Failing URLs” in Core Web Vitals (URLs designated as “Poor” or “Need improvement”).
- If you getting any security issues that may prevent your site from being considered as delivering a good page experience.
- And, whether a significant number of your pages which use HTTP instead of HTTPS.
Google has also said that great content will always continue to be a more important factor than page experience, and that great content with a poor page experience may still rank highly. However, if the quality of your content is similar to that of your competitors, then providing a positive page experience may give you a best in the search results, and paying attention to this report can help you deliver that page experience.
Enhancement Report
Enhancement Report — Similar to the Index Coverage report, these reports show you trends for errors, valid pages with errors and valid pages. And th Pages with errors aren’t shown in Google search results (as you know already). Pages with warnings can be shown in results, but the errors may be preventing them from showing in places that they might otherwise be eligible to appear, like the Top Stories carousel in the case of AMP pages, for example.
If you’re using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), then Google’s framework is designed to make your pages faster for mobile device users by serving them via its own cache, then you’ll see the AMP status report within the Enhancements section of your GSC. As a side note, one of the AMP’s biggest draws that was eligible to appear in the Top Stories carousel (Just like Affizoo has); when the page experience update rolls out, Google will also lift this restriction, enabling pages that perform well on page experience to appear in this coveted search feature.
The unparsable structured data report aggregates structured data syntax errors. These are covered within this report instead of the report for the specific feature (like event or job rich results, for example) because the errors may be preventing Google from identifying the feature type that your website has.
More reports can appear in the Enhancements tab depending on the structured data markup you’ve implemented & getting from your website. These can include reports for breadcrumb, video, logo and sitelinks searchbox markup, to name a few. Zooming is a specific error type within any given report which will also present you with a “validate fix” button — this can be used to communicate to Google that you’ve resolved an issue that was preventing the search engine from properly accessing a part of your website.
These are the four most important feature (Performance, Index Coverage, Page Experience, Enhancements Reports) that we've got covered in this article so that you know Google Search Console better than me. But if you're not satisfied with these features than you're most allowed to read in detail by clicking on button which is given at the last of this article.
How To Troubleshoot With Google Search Console
The Index Coverage and Enhancements reports already provide you with much of the information you’ll need to resolve indexing issues. In addition to those resources, GSC also offers the URL inspection tool and Manual Actions report to help you fixing problems that prevents your pages from showing up in Google search.
The URL inspection tool allows some features which enable you to access information about Google’s indexed report version of a given page. It’s especially useful because it consolidates all the errors associated with a page in one place.
URL inspector is a great tool. We have a dozens of webpages that drive most of our online revenue, so being able to focus on these is great. Seeing any outstanding issues and assessing the performance of those specific pages is really important for us.
You can also see the current index status of a page, AMP or structured data errors and much more. There’s also a “test live URL” button at the top-right-hand corner of the page that enables you to see if the page can be indexed or not; it’s especially a useful tool for testing whether issues still exist after you’ve implemented a fix.
You can also use the Request Indexing tool if you want Google to reindex your page (although indexing is not guaranteed). This is also useful after you’ve fixed errors or made substantial changes to a page.
I love being able to see whether a page is indexed and request indexing if it’s not. It makes getting new pages or changes indexed quick and easy.
The manual actions report. Manual actions are issued by Google when one of its human reviewers determines that page(s) on a site don’t meet the company’s webmaster quality guidelines. These violations can include hidden text, participating in link schemes and abusing structured data, to name a few examples. The consequences of a manual action can range from lower rankings for certain pages to the entire site being omitted from search results.
You’ll receive an updated email if Google issues a manual action for your site means if your site has any errors than Google will send you an email about issue and then you need to fix it.
The main overview section of your GSC will also show any manual actions; which are accessible in the manual actions section (within the left-hand navigation panel) of your GSC as well.
Click on the detected issue to expand the description and review a sample of your affected pages and then fix it. The description also contains a link that can help you learn how to resolve that particular manual action. After you’ve fixed all of the issues your site got, then you can request Google to review your site by clicking on the “request review” button. This process can take several days upto a week, and Google will email you a notification regarding the progress of the review & when issue git fixed. Do you support the Google friendly nature with Google Search Console. (Actually I support it, You also support)
How To Use Google Search Console Tool To Improve SEO Of Your Website Rankings In 2021
Google Search Console is a very powerful SEO tool for multiple reasons especially to track your website performance on daily basis. We recommend continue using Google Search Console when running SEO campaigns to maximize your visibility and to plan the overall strategy.
To increase your organic visibility for other search engines, make sure you use Bing Webmaster Tools as well to gain more insights for your blog/website. But, my favourite Webmaster tool is GSC. I think, you know it... Tell me about, what you gain about SEO with Google Search Console In comment section.
"If you're not satisfied with my content or if you want more information than click on below button to learn all GSC SEO Tool."
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